Getting Back Into Worldbuilding
… and going off the rails a bit as well
These past few weeks have been really productive, especially writing-wise. Well, at least when compared to, say, last year about this time. And the year before that, to be honest. So this is quite a cause for celebration, if you ask me. I think having the unfinished Where the Stars Used to Sing in the back of my mind the whole time really weighed on me more that I’d thought. But, now that it’s finished, I can just focus on other writing!
My writing has been mostly focused on fiction – although what exactly my Speculative Grammarian article should be classified as, is a good question as it’s written as an academic article, but is a fake article1. I have written an article that I’ve been mulling over for a few months for this journal and I’m glad to say that it’s going to be published, yay!
Going completely off the rails while writing
Being a satirical linguistics journal2, I wrote a type of research paper3 and said paper went completely off the rails as I was writing it and it turned out a lot more fun than the article I had initially planned. The article’s title is ‘A Proposal for Introducing the Progressive, Ancient JGHAR Practice to Increase Mental Stability and Productivity within the Linguistics Community’ – with JGHAR being ‘Just Go Home and Read’. The final author of the paper is one Prof. Picaxe Grimes XXVII, although I had planned to reuse one of the previous ‘academics’ I’d used for my previous SpecGram articles. This academic came about, however, as I suddenly found myself knee-deep in some hidden history4.
Let’s just say that, between fireproof paper prone to exploding, a hermit living in a garden shed (hey, not everyone can be a hermit on a fancy estate)5, and book titles like Understanding Dark Matter and the Secrets of Quantum by Solving for β, I had immense fun and may have to resurrect the Grimes family for a short story or two.6
Worldbuilding! Magic! Worldbuilding and Magic!
As for working on Porselein, I’ve been focusing on figuring out the main historical events that would create the world that the characters of the book7 inhabit. It actually helped a lot to have time away from the story as I could look at it now and go – okay, but why is the world working like that in the first place? And what are the limitations of the magic system and its influence on the wider world?
I’d had some vague ideas about the history and society when I was outlining the story initially, but I really needed to flesh it out so that, once the story starts, the world of the book is coherent and doesn’t rest on me saying ‘just go with it, it’s fantasy so it doesn’t have to make sense’.8
I’ve been listening to Writing Excuses for many years9, and I listened to their various episodes on magic and magic systems again. Episode 14 (Magic Systems and Their Rules) and Episode 15 (Costs and Ramifications of Magic)10 were especially helpful with pointers on thinking about the larger societal impact of the magic system in your world. One aspect that struck me, was what the cost of magic would be for those creating with magic and those who then go one to use the objects that have been imbued with magic.
I’d already built much of the physical and mental cost-implications for those who can create magical objects (specifically masks), as well as a good part of the economics that link with these costs11, but I hadn’t thought about what the costs are for those who then go on to use the magic within those masks. Oops.
I’m therefore writing the history and magic system elements at the same time and seeing how they influence one another. Because memory plays such a massive part in the story, I’m also reading up some more about how memory works and how I can use this knowledge to enrich the story. I’ve started reading Memory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan K. Foster, published by Oxford University Press. It not only contains an index - which is always handy - but also a list for further reading, and it should give me a good overview to see where I need to delve into some more research. I’ll share some more concrete worldbuilding once I get my notes in order – sharing my current scribbles won’t make sense to anyone but me, I’m afraid.
I’m also slowly but surely getting my website up to date and adding more of my writing as I go, not to mention getting the Substack back into shape. To read some of my fiction, click here, and for non-fiction, click here.
To end off with, here’s some new music by Adrian von Ziegler.
Writing it is a lot more fun than it sounds.
Basically a fake academic journal with linguists and language people joking around. It’s a bit of a niche publication.
A term I’m using very loose here.
Fake history, that is. I don’t mean ‘overlooked historical events’. Although, now that I think about it, rather calling it ‘faux history’ makes it seem a bit grander that ‘random stuff I made up around things that actually happened’.
These stories will have to go next to the back burner, however. There are already too many things I want to write that’s been put on the back burner.
I’m still sticking to this being a standalone…
Or ‘a wizard did it’ or ‘because they’re the main character’ or ‘because it’s cool’. It can be cool and still make sense.
I’m too scared to count after realising that the first time I’d written for Speculative Grammarian was 17 YEARS AGO. How did that happen?
Turns out these first aired in 2008. I’m starting to feel really old now.
Which includes some black market trading goings on.